Back in Black (7 page)
Before Cyn and Scott were a couple, Anna had played it close to the vest, never admitting to her friend how she felt about him. Now that he and Cyn had become a couple, she never would. Though she didn't know him well, Anna knew that Scott was so obviously not like other guys from her world as to be from another galaxy. His family had plenty of money, but that was the only similarity. He'd been raised in Boston, not New York City, and had moved to New York only couple of years ago, after his parents' divorce. His father wasn't in high finance or an industrialist but was a distinguished professor of government at Harvard who'd been lured to NYU with a named chair. Scholarship was a big part of the Spencer family tradition. Scott's mother was an editor at a highbrow literary magazine. Anna had never seen Scott without either a hardcover novel or a humor magazine under his arm. He reeked of smart. She found that endlessly fascinating.
His taste in girlfriends had gone similarly against the grain. Before Cyn, Scott's girlfriends had tended toward the exotic: Ethiopian, Indonesian, Moroccan. Rarely had he dated anyone from the northern hemisphere, until he'd met Cyn.
Even his looks were personal and distinctive. He was just over six feet, just under a hundred and seventy-five or so. His hair color shifted with the seasons—darker in winter, dirty blond in the summer. He tended toward a day or so of stubble and had welcoming green eyes and the complexion of a guy who loved to be outside. He was a jock intellectual, and Anna found him incredibly attractive.
When Anna had decided to spend the second half of her senior year in California, she'd been sad to leave Cyn behind. But it hadn't hurt at all to get three thousand miles away from the evidently blissful Cyn and Scott.
Anna didn't have the kind of friendship she had with Cyn with anyone in Los Angeles—Sam Sharpe was her closest friend, but they didn't have the same history that Cyn and Anna shared. But Anna realized her instincts had been correct: She found herself thinking about Cyn and Scott a lot less now that she was in California.
“I love you, too,” Anna replied with a laugh into her cell phone. “What's up?”
“You were supposed to call me last night, remember?” Cyn asked.
Anna took two steps over to one of the benches that lined the paths of the courtyard and sat down. She knew she might be late to American history, but she hadn't gotten less than an A on any test or paper, plus she'd already been accepted early decision to Yale. She was reasonably confident that her teacher would cut her a little slack.
“You're right,” she told Cyn. “Sorry. But I went to the Academy Awards.”
“The Academy Awards?” Cyn echoed incredulously. “You're kidding. I'd do anything to go sometime. You didn't invite me? What were you, a seat-filler?”
“I went with Sam Sharpe, actually.”
“Jackson's daughter. He was robbed, you know. So what was it like?”
“It was amazing.”
“Tell me everything,” Cyn commanded. So for the next ten minutes, with her best friend prompting her, Anna told her the whole story, from how designers had brought dresses over to Sam's for the two girls to try on, to her experience on the red carpet, right through to the ice cream sundaes with Sam and Jackson at their kitchen table. As she did, Anna relived the moments, feeling the thrill and the excitement all over again.
“Damn,” Cyn uttered when Anna had finished. “Last night we went to see some performance artist friend of Scott's roll around naked in crushed fruit—somehow I think you had a better time. I'm moving to Los Angeles. Does your dad have a guest room for us?”
Us. Meaning her and Scott. It was no surprise to hear that Scott had a friend who was a performance artist. He hung with everyone—uptown, downtown, no town.
“How is he, anyway?” Anna tried to sound casual.
“Oh, you know,” Cyn responded vaguely. “Hey, listen, girl, I'm proud of you.”
“Why?”
“Because you did something that's interesting and fun, instead of the same old shit. I don't suppose you made out with any superstars in the lobby?”
Anna laughed. “That would be you, not me.”
“God, you're just so hard to corrupt! So what other cool West Coast shit are you up to?”
Anna grinned. Cyn was calling
her
cool.
“Like what's the most decadent thing you've done so far?” Cyn prompted.
Nothing truly decadent came to Anna's mind. She did, however, want to impress Cyn. So she opened her mouth and words came out. “I'm going to Las Vegas, where I plan to indulge in many of the seven deadly sins.”
“Sweet!” Cyn cried. “When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“With who?”
“Friends. Sam, some others,” Anna tried to sound nonchalant but realized how tightly she was grasping the phone. This was so unlike her—to decide something on the spur of the moment. “We're leaving tomorrow.”
“You have to stay at the Palms,” Cyn decreed. “It's where they film all those poker shows on TV.”
“I don't play poker.”
Anna heard the bell ring. Second period had started.
She knew she'd be late, which was fine. But she didn't want to be ridiculously late.
“It doesn't matter. All the stars stay at the Palms. It rocks.”
“When were you in Vegas?”
“An overnight thing with a wild Spanish guy I met in San Francisco,” Cyn explained breezily. “We only stayed long enough for his thousand-dollar-a-chip craps game. Damn, you're going to Vegas and I go to some crappy art opening at Ivan Karp's gallery in SoHo. Erich Ommerle's cousin from Boston. Know how Georgia O'Keeffe painted flowers to look like giant vulvas? This woman paints vulvas to look like giant flowers. But Jeff Koons is supposed to be there, and I want to meet him. And—”
Anna waited for Cyn to finish her sentence and then realized the line was dead. She checked out her cell. No juice. Well, she'd just call Cyn later and apologize. At least her mind was made up about where she'd go. Viva Las Vegas. Seven deadly sins.
It could work.
L
ime green Bebe capris with a powder blue camisole lined in lime green velvet and grosgrain ribbon. Black-and-white Stella McCartney pin-striped trousers that barely cleared the zone where her pubic hair would be if she hadn't just gotten a Brazilian wax at Pink Cheeks. She'd wear the pants with a shrunken white six-ply cashmere sweater by Isaac Mizrahi, with diamond buttons added at Nobex Custom Tailor on Santa Monica Boulevard. Three pairs of basic pants; one Chanel, one Miu Miu, and one DKNY (with Lycra, for those bloated-fat-girl moments). Various tops—white silk Valentino, off-the-shoulder pink Vera Wang, and a red chiffon with lace overlay by Badgley Mischka. Two blazers—the very fitted black velvet Dolce & Gabbana and the more forgiving dove gray raw silk Matthew Williamson.
Sam gazed at the pile of clothes on her new queen-size bed with the twenty-thousand-dollar Hastens mattress imported from Sweden. These were the items that she had laid out for Vegas. She chucked the low-slung lime green capris. Like she would ever wear those in public—her thighs would look as if they were entering the room three minutes before she did. She knew they'd been a stupid purchase—she'd fallen for them on a Barneys shopping spree after a three-day wheat-grass-juice fast. That she had imagined her hips in these trousers without imagining two green warthogs that wrestled each other every time she took a step—she must have been hallucinating from the lack of solid food.
She sighed. It was too late to return them, so she'd have to give them to one of the maids. Whatever. She replaced the capris with a pair of black Mavi jeans hand embroidered by Willow, a blind artist who lived on Venice Beach and claimed she could “feel” each color she was embroidering. Pants she'd embroidered went for anywhere between five hundred and five thousand a pop. Willow's pants were the “It” thing of the moment. In a week or a month, her embroidered pants would be toast. The new look would be Parisian frills or monk-like simplicity. Whatever. Sam knew the secondhand stores in the valley would end up with a ton of Willow's embroidered pants. No one who knew anything would wear them anymore, of course. But then, the valley was another planet.
Sam threw her new oversize Tuff Betty carpetbag on the bed, then went into her palatial bathroom suite to arrange her toiletries. This part was easy, since she had Louisa the maid keep one set of all her faves in a Brontibay Paris travel case—Crème de la Mer, Z. Bigatti, plus her RéVive Glow Serum that sold for six hundred dollars an ounce at Neiman Marcus but which was hardly ever in stock. She'd been delighted to find a jar in her father's Academy Awards goody bag.
Shoes. She peered down at the new pink-and-white Swiss Masai athletic shoes with the two-inch rocking soles. The manufacturer swore that just walking around in them melted cellulite; they'd sent her a pair in hopes that Sam would be ground zero for a Swiss Masai athletic shoe buying spree by all her friends and classmates. But she'd never worn them, since they were so ugly. Hmm. Should she take them to Vegas? Melt some cellulite there? There certainly were some thigh dimples she wouldn't mind getting rid of during a stroll on the Strip. Or should she switch to the new Christian Louboutin black patent leather ankle boots with the four-inch red heels?
No contest. She tossed the athletic shoes back into the closet and zipped on the boots. With ankles like here, form definitely won out over function.
Okay. That was that. Anything else she needed—or wanted—she'd simply buy in Vegas.
Funny, she wasn't all that into going on this trip. Probably because Eduardo wouldn't be there to enjoy it with her. Eduardo. Her boyfriend. She loved the sound of that.
Back in Las Casitas, Mexico, where she'd first encountered Eduardo, the fact that he'd fallen hard for her had made zero sense to Sam. Because shit like that never happened to her. To Anna—oh yeah. Anna was some kind of a low-key guy magnet. Cammie—five times a day. Even Dee Young got her share of lust at first sight—there were plenty of guys who liked the cosmic-waif thing. But even with all the money she'd spent on her appearance—the clothes, the hair, the spa days—Sam didn't measure up to her friends. Which, on a day-to-day basis, was one of those things that sucked hard, but there was nothing she could do about it. Of course, that didn't mean she shouldn't try. What kind of girl would she be if she didn't make an effort?
And yet here she was with a fantastic boyfriend who thought her pear-shaped self was perfect. Go figure. The only problem was, it was an LDR—a long-distance romance. Eduardo didn't mind flying—he'd already come to Los Angeles twice to visit her. And he was making noises about a summer position at the Peruvian consulate, which would mean he'd be around all summer.
Sam's heart soared when she even thought about Eduardo. What was amazing was that they hadn't made love. They'd kissed, yes. Those kisses had left her breathless. But when she'd intimated on the day before he had to depart for Paris that she was more than willing to come to his suite at his hotel, he'd declined with a graciousness that Sam had never before seen in a guy. He didn't want hit-and-run sex, he'd said. Did she understand? She had. She'd reveled in his touch. She was in love.
Well, maybe. When it came to matters of the heart, Sam Sharpe was jaded beyond the usual jadedness of Beverly Hills kids, which was to say eleven on a scale of ten. It wasn't like she had a role model for romance. Her famous father always fell into bed with the ingenues on his movie sets. When the shoot ended, he was always careful to let them down gently and carefully. With, say, a piece of Harry Winston jewelry in the mid-five-figure range as a parting gift.
That was all Poppy Sinclair ever should have been. Sam would have forgiven him Poppy. Instead, though, he'd knocked her up. Instead of upping the jewelry to mid-six figures and sending Poppy on her way, Jackson had done the stand-up thing: He married her. Which was why Sam now had a six-week-old half-sister down the hall named Ruby Hummingbird, aka the Hummer. If the Hummer wasn't down the hall, she was in the kitchen. Or the living room. Or the bathroom. Or swaddled and at Poppy's breast in some inappropriate location. Sam couldn't understand how, on an estate the size of Aaron Spelling's, the little brat couldn't get lost, hopefully forever.
But no. The Hummer was everywhere. At age six weeks, she already had an entourage. A day nurse. A night nurse. A wet nurse. And all the Baby Einstein CDs that a six-week-old could handle. Plus the media, which had discovered that America and the world had an insatiable appetite for stories about the older action-movie star, his child bride, and their baby with the cute name. Suffice it to say that every coo, gurgle, and crappy diaper produced by the Hummer had been broadcast 24/7 on
Inside Access
and chronicled in
People
since she had arrived courtesy of the Cedars-Sinai maternity ward and a midwife flown in from the Farm, a commune in Summertown, Tennessee.
Sam hoisted her Tuff Betty bag and headed for the circular stairway. It was only ten o'clock, but the minor chords and lilting clarinet of klezmer-style music hit her before she reached step three.
Shit. Dee was at it again.
“Oh, Miss Sam?” Svetlana, who was Sam's favorite out of all the household help and had recently come to America from one of the western republics of the former Soviet Union (Sam couldn't remember whether it was Moldova or Belarus), was waiting for her at the base of the stairs. She'd been trained as a medical doctor in her home country but had chosen to emigrate to America to seek a better life for her children. She and Sam sometimes had long discussions over tea about Russian literature and the merits of capitalism and socialism. “Mrs. Sharpe would like you to join her in family room.”
“Thanks, Sveta,” Sam told her. “Who's visiting us today?”
“American fashion magazine,” the white-uniformed maid reported, then pushed some brown curls off her forehead. “I think
InStyle
. I return to kitchen now.”
The klezmer music got louder as Sam passed through the enormous white-tiled foyer on her way to the living room. She dropped her travel bags on the floor—she'd get them later, when she left for the plane—wondering what the theme of the
InStyle
shoot would be. Then she remembered: There was going to be a special Hollywood baby section in an upcoming issue, and Poppy's new-mother meditation group was going to be prominently featured.